When
Jean-Paul Sartre pronounced Marxism “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time,”
he merely confirmed a philosophical fashion that has dominated French
intellectual life since ‘30s. Although France has produced brilliant
existentialists, neo-Thomists and structuralists, Marxism continues to pervade
sophisticated discourse at elite French universities and to fire political
passions in Parisian salons of thought. But now a group of nine brash young
philosophers – most of them disillusioned graduates of the abortive student
riots of May 1968 – have mounted an erudite assault on the foundations of
Marxism. In fourteen books, all published since 1975, and in a recent round of
angry exchanges in the media, these nouveaux philosophes have made their
anti-Marxist polemics the topic of café conversation. And their critique of
Marxism may have a significant effect on the fortunes of the country’s emergent
leftist coalition of Socialists and Communists in next year’s elections.

The young authors have yet
to construct a new social philosophy, but their passionate defense of personal
freedom, their photogenic good looks and especially their sense of intellectual
betrayal by older Marxists and student anarchists, they represent the first wave
of intellectuals to emerge from the 1968 riots. Citing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
exposé of the Soviet prison system, they argue that French Marxists purposely
have refused to acknowledge Communist repression in Eastern Europe or to admit
that oppression itself is the logical result – and not merely a Russian
aberration – of Marxist – Leninist principles. From this position, each author
elaborates his own critique of socialist thought, and raises fundamental
philosophical questions that their university mentors considered solved by
Marxist dialectics. “This is not an anti-left philosophy”, says Bernard-Henri
Lévy, 28, the movement’s progenitor and chief publisher. “It’s anti-socialist –
a way of saying to the French left that it is making a gigantic and historic
error.

In
his current best seller, “Barbarity with a Human Face”, Lévy blames the
philosophers of the French Enlightenment for making reason the religion of the
modern state and justifying the subsequent use of force to raise the
consciousness of the unenlightened masses. He is especially critical of the
Enlightenment’s faith in inevitable human progress and its later expression in
Marx of the historical inevitability of state socialism. Communists, he argues,
have transformed state-enforced progress into “a reactionary machine that leads
the world to catastrophe”. Lévy concludes that power is the mechanism by which
society orders itself and the state will never wither away.

Anti-semitic:
By contrast, André Glucksmann, 40, perhaps the most seminal thinker in the
group, locates the origins of both Marxism and Nazism in nineteenth-century
German philosophy. In his best seller, “The Master Thinkers”, he claims that
Hegel, Fichte, Marx and Nietzche each developed philosophical systems to forge
the creation of a German state. Each called for a revolution each elaborated a
science of government that separates rulers from the ruled and each looked to
the state as the crucible fro the transformation of humanity. Glucksmann
contends that French Marxists imported this intellectual tradition from the
U.S.S.R. and, if given political power, they would crush spontaneity and
personal freedom just as the French Communists shut factory doors against
sympathetic students rioters in 1968. He also believes that Marxism, like
Nazism, is inherently anti-Semitic. “The Jew is a merchant who ignores
frontiers”.

Much
to their own surprise, the new philosophers’ rejection of Marxism, nationalism
and progress has provoked the liveliest intellectual debate since the advent of
Sartre himself. French magazines have featured the handsome young authors on
their covers and a 90-minute debate in the new philosophy last spring drew 4
million television viewers.

“Mayonnaise”:
In reaction, the left has mounted a counterattack. The Communists have denounced
the movement as “The New Right”. Marxist revolutionary Régis Débray finds the
authors “inexperienced “ in tarring French socialism with the excesses of the
Soviet gulags. On the other hand, structuralist Michel Foucault, probably the
most respected intellectual in France, has praised the upstarts for reminding
philosophers of the “bloody” consequences that have flowed from enlightened
social theories. Catholic theologian Father Raymond-Léopold Bruckberger
recognizes in the new anti-Marxists ideas that religious thinkers Jacques
Maritain, Georges Bernanos and Simone Veil put forward a generation ago. “Now
suddenly, the same things said at a different times by others… are understood
and welcomed”, Bruckberger wrote in Le Journal du Dimanche. “It’s the miracle of
a mayonnaise that curdles twenty times and suddenly… takes”.

What
concerns French politicians is whether this fashionable movement will help tip
next year’s elections away from the presently favored Socialist-Communist
coalition. Socialist Party chief François Mitterand, the left’s likely candidate
for Premier, has promised an assessment of the movement’s views. President
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing has capitalizes on the anti-Marxist vogue by
entertaining some of the new philosophers at the Elysée Palace. Among
themselves, however, the philosophers profess to see little difference between
the political left and right. In time, says Lévy, “a new idea for the management
of society – other than socialism – could be born”. Meanwhile, like the young
Albert Camus, Lévy and his colleagues counsel their generation to abandon the
search for a new ideological system and to resist oppression as best they can
through personal ethics and moral duty.

It was 30
years ago that existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre's introverted black-sweater
philosophy, became the intellectual rage in Paris and much of the western world.
The Sartre creed had a good long life, but it faded some time ago without
being replaced. Now a successor may have arrived, making an explosive entry
because of its potential influence on France's general election eight months
hence. The new movement is unashamedly anti-communist. It represents the
soul-searching of half a dozen youthful ex-Marxists who have been named (mainly
because it sounds good) the "new philosophers".

There is
something conspicuously modish about them. But what most intrigues France is
their philosophical somersault from adoration of Karl Marx to total rejection of
the German thinker. They were Maoist rebels many of whom manned the barricades
in France's May, 1968, student uprising against the government. Now President
Giscard d'Estaing invites them to cocktails at the Elysee presidential palace.

The "new
philosophy" seems to have been steadily gaining momentum since its breakthrough
in the spring, when two books were published which have become roaring
bestsellers - an extremely rare event for philosophical works which make no
concessions to man-in-the-street reading appetites.

On the
strength of Andre Glucksmann's "Les Maitres Penseurs" (master thinkers) and
Bernard-Henri Levy's "Barbarie a Visage Humain" (barbarity with a human face), a
set of ideas which grew out of bewildered disappointment with 1968 has hit the
jackpot. These two books have sold around 80,000 copies each in a few months,
more than any but the most successful novel in France. They have also drawn
attention to other recent books in the same mould, including Jean-Marie
Benoist's "Marx est Mort" and Guy Lardreau's and Christian considered to be the
gospel for the entire school. The new philosophers ahve received lavish exposure
on the state-run television. France's leading newspapers and magazines have
analysed, praised, scorned but above all publicised them. They drew more people
(an estimated 2,000) to an open philosophy meeting at the new Georges Pomipidou
cultural centre in Paris last month than a front-rank politician would expect to
attract to an election meeting. Glucksmann, at 40 the long-tressed, volatile
"old man" of the group, recently donned a grotesque Giscard maskt to interview
three eastern block dissidents on national television. The curious joke seemed
to signal contempt for the French president's kid-glove approach to Mr Brezhnev
on the human rights issue.

Yet M.
Giscard d'Estaing and the government majority are justifiably gratified by the
"new philosophy".Its central theme is what Levy and his friends call "the
master". This key word stands for power, the system, the state - and, by logical
extension, the world. There is no way of beating the master. To tell people that
socialism, communism or revolution can get rid of the master is to delude them.
This chain of argument reflects the numbed disenchantment of the new philosopher
with the left rebellion of May 1968, which Levy writes off as a disaster. At his
holiday home on the French Riviera the handsome 30-year-old spokesman for the
group explained: "It showed the impossibility of revolution. For us it became
the bankruptcy of socialism."

The
beleaguered forces of President Giscard d'Estaing are keen to hitch this
anti-socialist force to their creaking wagon in the coming election campaign.
The president's only regret, having invited Levy and Benoist to the Elysee with
other esteemed intellectuals, is his failure to conscript them into pre-election
service. For despite their indictment of socialism, they are wary of taking
active political sides. Nevertheless, their example has shattered the general
assumption in France that any intellectual worth his salt will support the
Socialist-Communist left.

The
Communists have decided to strike back at the renegades. The party newspaper,
L'Humanite, commented scathingly that they are "neither new nor philosophers".
It compared the Levy and Glucksmann books with communiques put out by the
Pechiney company, a French industrial giant which the Communists equate with
classical capitalism. A hostile volume called "Against the New Philosophy",
written by two Marxists, is now selling briskly in its own right in Paris
bookshops. The issue is far more complex for Mr Francois Mitterrand's Socialist
party, which sees itself as the party of enlightened progress. The Socialists
are hoping to ride to power next year on the votes of millions of yound people,
now aged around 30, who actively or tacitly supported the 1968 uprising. In the
heat of discussion on the new philosophy, some Socialist leaders have betrayed
their irritation by dubbing it "the new right". But Mr Mitterrand himself, who
once invited the sharp-minded Levy to help him shape party policy, has been more
circumspect. He says the trend deserves far more than an off-the-cuff response,
and has promised his assessment in writing. Levy is the image-maker of the
group. It was he, as a publishing executive, who coined the name for their
overlapping ideas. When he became head of the philosphy section at the Grasset
publishing house two years ago, he started rounding up likeminded intellectuals
to write for Grasset too. The house has put out all the recent bestsellers. With
the exception of Glucksmann, whose German Jewish parents fled to France from
Hitler in 1936, the new philosophers are strikingly similar in background:
middle class origins; mostly graduates of the distinguished Ecole Normale
Superieure; smitten by communism while studying under the French Marxist
philosopher, Louis Althusser; then forced to review their attitude not only by
the 1968 events but also by the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "Gulag", the
title of the Russian author's most famous work, is constantly used by the new
philosophers to denote Marxist failure. Gluckmann claims that the French left
has ignored Solzhenitsyn, or cast him as a crazy reactionary, to keep its hands
clean. Andd Levy, who admits that he first saw the red army intervention in
Czechoslovakia as a necessary move to crush counter-revolution, has undergone
his own revolution.

Some French
critics claim that the new philosophy is just another example of time changing
youthful attitudes, and dismiss the movement as merely the latest fashionable
literary cult. This is partly because the school has no real answer for the
problems it raises. Its emphasis on individual responsibility and the importance
of acting for oneself is somewhat vague.

Yet the new
philosophy could be viewed as the first western attempt to build a philosophy
around the sort of human rights position taken by President Carter. Levy says it
has not only aroused publishing enthusiasm in other west European countries but,
so he hears, clandestine interest in eastern Europe.

Paris: Moses and Polytheism

Barbarism with a Human
Face

by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated by George Holoch

Le testament de
Dieu

by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Les idées à
l'endroit

by Alain de Benoist

Hallier, 298 pp., 45 francs

Vu de droite

by Alain de Benoist

Copernic, 626 pp., 150 francs

"Almost two thousand years, and no new god!"

Nietzsche, The Antichrist

Voltaire
said that if God did not exist, man would have to invent Him. If we are to
believe the French press, 1979 may be remembered as the year when two very
different Parisian intellectuals applied for their respective patents on their
own brand of deity.

With Le
testament de Dieu, Bernard-Henri Lévy, thirty-one years old, ex-Maoist,
ex-journalist, and self-proclaimed "New Philosopher," has become the latter-day
prophet of a God who, though now deceased, was kind enough to leave behind His
last will and testament, the Bible, as a bulwark against totalitarianism. With
Les idées à l'endroit Alain de Benoist, ex-Catholic, ex-reactionary, and
self-proclaimed "theoretical journalist," has presented a compendium of essays
that attempts to lay the sociobiological foundations for a new paganism, a new
aristocrat, and what is called the "New Right." "The debate between monotheism
and polytheism," de Benoist writes, "is a truly essential discussion." But
strangely enough, neither man actually believes in the deity or deities
he proposes: they are merely convenient foils to help man muddle through the
mess of the modern world. Nietzsche was right after all. You can take your pick:
the barren heights of Mount Sinai with Lévy, or the misty haunts of Celtic
forests with de Benoist—a dead Yahweh or a vitalistic Wotan. In either case, to
adapt a phrase from James Joyce, these are very posthumous gods.

For all their differences, Lévy and de Benoist have a lot
in common. Each declares himself a moralist in philosophy, a nominalist in world
view, and an antitotalitarian in politics. Both are skillful Parisian publicists
(Lévy is an editor at Grasset, de Benoist at Copernic), and both have written
much-acclaimed books (Barbarism with a Human Face won the 1977 Prix
d'Honneur de l'essai, and Vu de droite won the 1978 Grand Prix de
l'essai from the Académie française). Each has set flame to his
recent past (for Lévy, Maoism, for de Benoist, the "Old Right") and risen like a
Phoenix from the ashes to go on to condemn Marxism and modern liberalism, the
Gulag and Coca-Cola, fascism of the left and right, the Inquisition, the
Enlightenment, and the rule of the masses.

Yet as we
might expect from these heralds of monotheism and polytheism, they have spent
much energy excommunicating each other. There they were last July in the offices
of France-Soir for a round-table discussion, glaring at each other
uncivilly from their respective worlds, only a few days after Sartre and Aron
had managed to shake hands over the issue of the Vietnamese boat-people. In the
course of the exchange Lévy declared himself "shocked by the ideological and
theoretical poverty" of de Benoist's writings, while de Benoist found Lévy's
books "not worth a trifle." "I am filled with hatred for you," Lévy hissed. "I
hate no one," de Benoist replied, for the sixteenth maxim of his code of
aristocratic ethics (Les idées…, p. 52) enjoins: "Never hate, but despise
often." It was the best show since Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley went after
each other on television over a decade ago. The nouveau philosophe and
the nouveau droitier, the prophet and the druid, seemed to deserve each
other.

It is not
easy to place Lévy and de Benoist in recent French philosophy, not least of all
because it is stretching the word to call either of them a "philosopher." To be
sure, Lévy studied under the Marxist Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure and claims to be a Lacanian. De Benoist, who studied law and letters
at the Sorbonne, is an autodidact in the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The
range of books that they cite is immense (but de Benoist, unlike Lévy, seems
actually to read them), and the urgency with which they press their
points would have you believe that the fate of the West hangs on the result of
their debate.

Lévy, unlike de Benoist, is a child of the student
revolution of 1968. After structuralism's Gang of Four—Lévi-Strauss, Foucault,
Lacan, and Althusser—had "displaced" the human "subject"—the individual thinking
consciousness—in favor of the linguistic code, and that subject's alleged
history-making in favor of invariant structures,the revolt of May 1968 was a
made-to-order structuralist's delight. More a cultural than a political crisis,
more a synchronic liturgy than a diachronic historical event, it could be seen
as reenacting the myths of the French tribe (1848, the 1870 Commune) around a
transpersonal hero (the Eternal Child, le révolté) within neat classical
unities of time and place (the Left Bank, May 3 through June 16). Although its
political consequences were practically nil, this modern ritual did appear to
prove what the structuralists had argued at some length: the supremacy of the
code—in this case, the media—over the message to be codified. As cameramen
freely crossed the barricades, ministering to both sides like priests in
medieval wars, the essential point became clear: it is more important to
faire la une ("make page one") than to win. The coverage of the event is
the event.

The point,
we may imagine, was not lost on the then twenty-year-old Bernard-Henri Lévy, who
followed the action not in the streets but in his room, by television and radio,
with a map of Paris across his lap. Without his skillful use of the press and
television some seven years later, the so-called "New Philosophers" would never
have been launched. In fact, Lévy, who is dramatically handsome and remarkably
fluent, seems to have been made for television from the start (he acted in a TV
film between writing his two books), even if it took him some years to get
there.

After the
debacle of May 1968, Lévy, then a Maoist, heeded André Malraux's call and went
off to Bangladesh. There he awakened from his dogmatic slumber and discovered
that there was no difference between "progressive" and "reactionary" corpses.
After spending a week posing as a journalist in a group of lackadaisical
"guerrillas" (they never fought), he took off to India where he got rolled by a
junkie and, though the son of a millionaire, financed his way home by running
booze between Bombay and Goa. Such enterprising skills, combined with his
facility with words, served him well once he was back in Paris. One day he
walked into Grasset publishing house, discussed some projects off the top of his
head, and, mirabile dictu, got himself hired as an editor and, a few
months later, was appointed the director of two new series of books. He
corralled some manuscripts from old friends at the Ecole Normale, rushed them
into print, and in 1976 took to the television screens to announce the birth of
the "New Philosophers." A year later he crowned these efforts by publishing his
own Barbarism with a Human Face. At that point he had more requests for
newspaper interviews and TV appearances than he could conveniently handle, and
he earned himself the title pub-philosophe, "publicity philosopher."
Metaphysics, having long been dead and buried, was resurrected as a media hype.

The mood of
the French press and public contributed to their success. The appearance of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in 1974 severely undermined
residual sympathies for the Soviet Union, just as the later revelations about
communist behavior in Cambodia shook liberal sympathies for Third World
socialism. Moreover, the emergence of France's brand of
Euro-communism—permitting the alliance of communist and socialist parties in the
Union of the Left—made many Frenchmen uneasy. The Common Program of the two
parties, for example, called for government control over banking and credit.
Since newspapers had been suffering the burden of rising costs since 1974, this
was seen as an implicit threat to an independent and critical press. The
collapse of the Union of the Left before and during the elections of March 1978
seemed to point up the hypocrisy of this uneasy marriage. As the Left's
dominance of political discourse in France was increasingly shaken, the New
Philosophers found a ready audience, not least among editors and television
producers.

It is impossible to discuss the New Philosophers as if
they represented a unified viewpoint on anything.[1]
While they were all deeply affected by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work, their only
point in common may be that they have recently been issued by the same
publisher. Some but not all were Maoists in 1968; one, Jean-Marie Benoist (not
to be confused with Alain de Benoist), sat out the revolution as a diplomat in
London, while another, Jean-Paul Dollé, fancies himself a Heideggerian. André
Glucksmann, who publishes with Grasset but not in Lévy's series, refuses
even to be grouped with them. Therefore, in discussing Lévy's two books (they
have to be read together), I have no illusions that I am commenting on the other
writers who are popularly associated with him.

Springtime,
O. Henry once wrote, is the season when young men discover what young women have
known all winter long. Lévy's bitter springtime, his discovery of the Gulag that
other intellectuals, including Sartre, had known about for over twenty years,
has engendered the purple prose, alternately threnodic and dithyrambic, that we
find in Barbarism with a Human Face and The Testament of God. "If
I were a poet," he writes, "I would sing of the horror of living and the new
Gulags that tomorrow holds in store for us. If I were a musician, I would speak
of the idiot laughter and impotent tears, the dreadful uproar made by the lost,
camped in the ruins, awaiting their fate." This is pretty heavy stuff, but, as
Husserl observed at the turn of the century, one is most vehement against those
errors that one recently held oneself. "If I were an encyclopedist, I would
dream of writing in a dictionary of the year 2000: 'Socialism, n.,
cultural style, born in Paris in 1848, died in Paris in 1968.' " But Lévy is no
easier on his young self: he confesses, with a straight face, "I will soon be
thirty, and I have betrayed the dream of my youth at least a hundred times."
Such earnestness is enough to make cynics weep, and it just might sustain some
of them through the two hundred pages of narcissistic prose that one finds in
his philosophical Bildungsroman called Barbarism with a Human Face.

Lévy is like
the man in Paddy Chayevsky's film Network: he insists he is mad as hell,
that he's not going to take it any more. He has discovered, in a mood of "the
darkest and most tragic pessimism," that the Marxism he once believed in is a
lie: "No socialism without camps, no classless society without its terrorist
truth." Not that capitalism is any better. No, socialism is the face and
capitalism the body of the same inevitable nihilism toward which the West is
stumbling like a drunken Dimitri Karamazov. In fact, reality itself is radically
evil, held in the clutches of an impersonal Power or Master or Prince or State
(all in capitals and all equal to each other), as Plato and Schopenhauer, those
"melancholy experts in absolute evil," knew. There is no Rousseauan nature that
antedated the state and no revolutionary paradise to be found after the supposed
"withering away" of the state. Nothing escapes the dread equation: World = Power
= State = Barbarism. Misery will last as long as the social bond does, and that
will go on forever. "Rebellion is unthinkable inside the real world."

But that
leaves the "unreal world" and "the impossible thought of a world freed from
Mastery." Thus, "the antibarbarian intellectual will be first of all a
metaphysician, and when I say metaphysician I mean it in an angelic sense." In
Barbarism with a Human Face, however, we come to the end without being
told just what that might mean. Enter: The Testament of God. Its first
principle is that politics must be restricted to make room for ethics and for an
individual who can resist barbarism. Second principle: such an individual can
not be found in classical Greek thought, where the individual is subsumed by
the general and where the notion of "conscience" was unknown. It can only (third
principle) be found in classical Judaism's "wager" on a Totally Other who is
never incarnate in the world, in fact is now dead, although somehow goes on
living, or partly living, in that "book of resistance" called the Bible.

The choice, then, is the same as it was for Tertullian in
the third century: Athens or Jerusalem. Lévy's response is "Forget Athens." In
place of its supposed humanism (which in fact is the root of totalitarianism
insofar as it subsumes the individual under the general) Lévy proposes "seven
new commandments." 1. The Law (Lévy's stand-in for God, but not to be confused
with any specific laws) is outside time and more holy than History. 2.
There is no eschatological future; rather, every moment is the right moment for
manifesting the Good. 3. The future is none of your business: act now. 4.
Undertake no act that cannot be universalized for all men. 5. Truth, one's own
truth, is extraneous to the political order. 6. Practice resistance, without a
theory and without belonging to a revolutionary party. 7. In order to engage
yourself you must first of all disengage yourself. If we ask Lévy what all this
might entail for day-to-day politics, he comes down on the side of a
"liberal-libertarian" state, which would govern best by governing least.

Little can
be said about Lévy's position precisely because so little of it is ever argued.
He makes his points by rhetorical tropes, wide-ranging historical references
("Consider the Middle Ages," he advises, or the span of history "from Epictetus
to Malraux"), or by citations from books that he evidently hasn't read or has
poorly digested (a reference to a work by Stalin in the Russian, which Lévy does
not read, a reference to all of Clement of Alexandria's mammoth
Protrepticus, which he has not studied, and so on).

He was taken
to task in the pages of Le Nouvel Observateur last spring by Professor
Pierre Vidal-Naquet of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for
gross factual and historical errors: claiming that in Genesis Adam and Eve
committed their Original Sin on the seventh day of creation (when God was
resting), placing the action of Sophocles' Antigone in fifth-century
Athens when in fact it deals with Thebes in the second millennium BC ("This,"
says Vidal-Naquet, "would be like using Racine's Phèdre as a document on
Crete in the time of Louis XIV"), taking an 1818 text by Benjamin Constant as a
commentary on an 1864 text by Fustel de Coulanges (Lévy in fact lifted both
texts from a footnote in another work, but absolved himself of citing the
source), and having Himmler stand trial at Nuremberg when in fact he had
committed suicide on May 23, 1945. Lévy's sense of history is, to say the least,
vague. When asked what he meant by saying that "the West was Christian even when
the Scriptures were not read in the countryside"—and analogously—"The
Greek world was Homeric even if, outside the Mycenaean palaces, the Iliad
and the Odyssey were literally dead letters," Lévy confessed that he
hadn't known that the Greek epic poems were written some centuries after the
events they recount.

All this may
be unfair. There is a long tradition of young scholars carrying out their
education in public—Schelling enriched nineteenth-century philosophy by doing
so. But it can be annoying when, instead of arguing his case, the young Dr. Lévy
invites us, as he constantly does, to correct our intellectual errors by
"reading" or "rereading" one or another major figure of Western thought, a task
we might undertake if we thought Lévy had done as much. A rough count of his ABC
of Reading includes: Lenin, Blum, Jaurès, the early Sorel, Plato's Republic,
Marx's Capital, "the rules of the medieval convents," Rimbaud, Carl
Schmidt, "the historians of the decline of the Hellenic world," Mein Kampf,
Augustine's Retractiones, Nietzsche's The Dawn, St. Just, and
Ernst Jünger. We are also encouraged to "go and see The Night Porter, Sex
O'clock, A Clockwork Orange, or more recently L'Ombre des anges" in
order to understand what harm has been wrought by Deleuze and Guattari's
L'Anti-Oedipe. This makes one recall the quip attributed to Abraham Lincoln,
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and
remove all doubt." In France, however, Le testament de Dieu was at or
near the top of the best-seller list throughout last summer.

Alain de Benoist is a better writer, a clearer thinker,
and a much more dangerous figure. He followed the events of May 1968 in the
streets, but he saw them not as ushering in Year One of the New Order of Things
but as a futile spectacle that announced "the end of the postwar period." While
Lévy was off seeking adventure in Bangladesh, de Benoist stayed in Paris,
tirelessly reviewing hundreds of books for the rightist publications Valeurs
actuelles and Le Spectacle du monde (125 of these reviews were
published in 1977 as Vu de droite) and seeing to the birth of the New
Right.

De Benoist
claims that the central issues of the traditional right, among them genetics,
race, and inequality, have been discredited by their association with Nazism,
and he tries to give them new life by grafting them on to such subsciences as
sociobiology and ethnology. De Benoist is particularly attracted to sociobiology,
which has recently gained an enthusiastic hearing in France. But he has a
tendency to present the hypotheses of sociobiology as proven conclusions and
then to extend these "conclusions" to far-ranging fields. For example, he
writes, "all politics today implies a biopolitics." And he cites with enthusiasm
the words of Professor Robert Mallet, the chancellor of the Universities of
Paris, that some day "the genetic code will help inform the civil codes."

Although the
French press and television woke up to the New Right only in March 1978, when
Gilbert Comte ran a series of articles entitled "Une nouvelle droite?" in
Le Monde, its origins reach back to March 1968, when the journal
Nouvelle Ecole first appeared (de Benoist became its editor-in-chief in
1969) and to the founding, a few months later, of the study club called GRECE,
an acronym for "Research and Study Group for European Civilization" (Groupement
de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne).[2]

Although de
Benoist heralds these events as the beginning of a "new culture of the right,"
purged of the obscurantism, racism, individualism, and "father complex" of the
reactionary right ("The Old Right is dead," he writes, "and deserves to be"),
nonetheless the rosters of GRECE and Nouvelle Ecole read like a
high-school reunion of old reactionaries and fascists. Jean Mabire, alleged
collaborator in World War II and former editor of the extremist magazine
Europe Action ("the magazine of Western man"), is now on the editorial
committee of GRECE's newspaper Eléments. (De Benoist, who used to write
for Europe Action, favorably quotes Mabire's paean to kamikaze pilots on
page 227 of Vu de droite.) The comité de patronage of Nouvelle
Ecole includes—besides such notables as Mircea Eliade, Konrad Lorenz, and
Arthur Koestler—half of the editorial staff of the racist Mankind Quarterly
of Edinburgh (R. Gayre, Robert Kuttner, and the late Henry E. Garrett) and at
least two members of its Honorary Advisory Board (Bertil Lundman, a former
contributor to the Nazi racist journal Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde—as
well as H. J. Eysenck[3]
). De Benoist himself is on the Advisory Board (and Arthur R. Jensen is an
"Honorary Adviser") of the neo-fascist German magazine Neue Anthropologie,
whose editor, Jürgen Rieger, has condemned the "bastardizing" of races and has
announced, in all seriousness, "The white giants are coming!" Neue
Anthropologie, Mankind Quarterly, and Nouvelle Ecole all carry
advertisements for one another.

GRECE and de Benoist have a strange penchant for the
demimonde of right extremism. On May 28, 1978, the Washington Post
reported that representatives of Nouvelle Ecole participated in the
eleventh annual conference of the allegedly anti-Semitic World Anti-Communist
League in Washington DC (its chairman, Roger Pearson, was formerly on the
comité de patronage of Nouvelle Ecole) and met with William Pierce, a
former spokesman of the American Nazi Party.[4]
The Spring 1979 issue of Nouveile Ecole carried an article on pages 62-69
by one "Robert de Herte" (a collective pseudonym) on the inherited nature of
musical talent. Footnote three on page 65 and footnotes six and eight at the end
cite some thirteen works published in Nazi Germany on the topics of the
"physical type" of great musicians and the relation between music and heredity.
On May 29, 1973, GRECE sponsored a lecture on the theme of Europe by the
self-declared fascist writer Maurice Bardèche, and de Benoist, in a chilling
essay on "Les corps d'élite" in Vu de droite, approvingly cites
Bardèche's remarks on "the exaltation of courage and energy" in Spartan
education, followed by a rhapsodic description of the US Marines by the rightist
François d'Orcival.

The very
powerful French publisher Robert Hersant—a former Pétainist who is currently the
owner of one-fifth of France's newspapers—got into the picture when he bought up
Le Figaro in 1975. He appointed Louis Pauwels—a well-known conservative
editor who wrote an admiring book on Gurdjieff and was identified with the
Gurdjieff movement—as the director of the spin-off weekly, Le Figaro Magazine,
and Pauwels hired de Benoist to write a regular column on "the movement of
ideas." Pauwels is also on the comité de patronage of Nouvelle Ecole.

Just what this all amounts to so far as de Benoist is
concerned is still something of a mystery. Raymond Aron, himself Jewish,
cautiously affirms that "Alain de Benoist defends himself from being [an
anti-Semite], if not from having been one,"[5]but others have detected more than a whiff of
racism in Nouvelle Ecole's fascination with the purity and strength of
the Indo-European race. De Benoist, for example, finds it hard to conceal his
enthusiasm for the French theorist of racial determination Arthur de Gobineau
(1816-1882), whose Essay on the Inequality of Human Races asserted that
different races have "very unequal destinies." Gobineau warned that Aryan
society should resist mixing with the black or yellow races lest it lose its
vitality and sink into corruption. De Benoist tries to salvage the Essay,
which deeply influenced such French rightists as Charles Maurras, by calling it
a work on the "diversity" rather than the inequality of races.

This much is
sure: the one thing Alain de Benoist does not like is egalitarianism—not
equality, which he takes to be an impossibility, but the myth of
equality, the very idea that men should be equal and should build societies on
that notion. Not that he wants inequality per se. Rather, he wants
diversity, "the right to difference," especially in racial matters, and with
that a hierarchy, an elite, and a corresponding order, and, inevitably, then,
relative inequality.

De Benoist
does not believe, as Bossuet did not, that "some men are more men than other
men," but he does agree with his colleague Pauwels that "equality is an
injustice done to the capable." Nor is he a racist: all races, he says, are
superior, and he is willing to go so far as to say that "all men of quality are
brothers, regardless of race, country, or time." Although it is a fact, he says,
that relative inequality comes with diversity, not all inequalities, especially
of an economic sort, are just. De Benoist favors equality of chances (Nixon's
Olympic metaphor of "an equal shot at the starting line"), and after that
everyone is on his own.

Reading de Benoist's works, I had the clear impression
that he did not arrive at his notion of inegalitarianism by induction from the
data but that he began with it and then started collecting all the information
that could support his conviction and attacking everything that might militate
against it. The French have a pun: Dis-moi que tu aimes, et je dirai qui tu
es (hais): "Tell me what you love, and I'll tell you who you are (whom you
hate)." According to the sixteenth maxim of his code of ethics, de Benoist is
not allowed to hate, only to despise (even though he delivers himself of the
opinion that "one learns to love to the degree one learns to hate").

Nonetheless
we can find out where his heart lies. De Benoist adores pagan polytheism because
its many deities are made in man's image, consecrate his diversity, and
guarantee his freedom. De Benoist despises monotheism because "its intrinsic
totalitarian character" has engendered reductionism (where all knowledge can be
led back to unity) and egalitarianism (which declares all men equal before God).
De Benoist loves the Indo-Europeans and especially the Celts for "their specific
mental character," their physical characteristics, and perhaps (he cites Ernst
Renan on the point) "the purity of their blood and the inviolability of their
character." He despises Judaism (not Jews) for its intolerance and fanaticism,
for consecrating a master-slave relationship before God, and for its "moral
justification for killing the other." He likes biology because it affirms the
diversity of species, and he despises Christianity, that "bolshevism of
antiquity," which formed a counterculture of rootless slaves and Orientals who
hated the very idea of fatherland, preached class warfare, and wrought "the
progressive homogenization of the world" with their doctrine of universal love.

But
fortunately for him the doctrine of equality has run through the three stages of
its cycle—the mythic stage of Christianity, the philosophical stage of the
Enlightenment, and the "scientific" one of Marxism—and the time is ripe to "raze
the ground" and to start building the new myth of inegalitarianism. "We have
something like a century in which to succeed," he writes, "which means that
there isn't a moment to lose."

Preparing
the ground for the new inegalitarianism entails educating an aristocratic elite
of "supermen," not the muscular blond giants of Nazi fantasies, he says, but an
elite of character. In a world that is intrinsically chaotic and meaningless and
that gets its meaning only from the force of man's will, what are needed are
"heroic subjects" who can create themselves and their own laws and who will
remain faithful to norms they set for themselves. He cites examples from the
motto of the Marines, Semper fidelis, as well as that of the SS, Meine
Ehre heisst Treue ("My honor is called fidelity"). Such heroes will neither
offer nor demand reasons, but will stick to their pledge and "keep silent."
"Soldiers who, in order to fight, need to know why they are fighting are
mediocre soldiers. And worse than them are soldiers who need to be convinced
that their cause is good" (seventeenth maxim of the code of ethics).

In politics this translates into the "Organic State."
Whereas today the state is no more than the sum of its inhabitants, de Benoist
imagines a state that would be more than such a sum, and this "more" is
called the raison d'état and is the basis for what he calls the
"transcendence of the principle of authority." Precisely because America,
dedicated as it is to "homogeneity" and "prosperous communism," does not
understand these concepts, it "submitted the executive to the judiciary" and
toppled President Nixon. And no wonder! "The very word 'fatherland' does not
exist in the American vocabulary." No wonder, too, that America was defeated in
Vietnam. "The moving force in politics is not morality or philanthropy, but only
energy. The essence of politics is energy. The destiny of peoples is not shaped
by 'interesting' cases or 'just' causes but by the energy and force that are put
at the service of these causes—and at the service of others, to be sure." What
might motivate a nation to "serve others" is never specified.

It is not
clear in de Benoist's case what is "new" about the "New Right," any more than it
is clear in Lévy's case what is "philosophical" about his "New Philosophy." De
Benoist tinkers here and there with the familiar model that calls for an elite
based on the superiority of the white Europeans and is contemptuous of Christian
tolerance and political democracy; but basically he serves up the same old
stuff. He styles himself a "raciophile," that is, one who wants each race to
preserve its own heritage and purity, as contrasted with a "raciophobe," one who
wants to blend races into a hodgepodge. But behind this semantic subterfuge we
still know who's not coming to dinner. "We see some ideologues taking positions
on respect for all races—except one: ours (which by the way is also theirs)," he
writes. And citing Professor Raymond Ruyer of the University of Nancy, de
Benoist writes, "If one denounces, correctly, the ethnocide of primitives by
Europeans, then Europeans cannot be prohibited from protecting their own proper
ethnicity (ethnies)."

Such
protection has a long history in France, and it should not be surprising to find
these sentiments coming to the surface at a time when the rich and poor nations
of the third world may seem to impinge on Europe more ominously than ever
before. What is troubling is to find de Benoist getting a serious hearing and
being awarded a prize by the French Academy in the country of Montaigne, who
said, "Every man bears in himself the whole human condition."

[2]Quite
a separate phenomenon is the Club de l'Horloge, composed of some 120
young technocrats, most of them graduates of the Ecole Nationale
d'Administration and the Polytechnique. Their spokesman, Yvon Blot, says, I
believe correctly, "We have nothing to do with the New Right or with GRECE."
However, M. Blot says, "Sociobiology is making spectacular progress. It cannot
be ignored just because it is close to certain Nazi themes." On the Club de
l'Horloge and the New Right, see Le Matin (Paris), July 25, 1979, pp.
15-17, July 26, 1979, pp. 10-11, and July 27, 1979, pp. 12-14.

[3]On
Eysenck see Peter Medawar, "Unnatural Science," The New York Review of Books,
February 3, 1977, pp. 13-18. Eysenck is always careful to insist he opposes
racial discrimination, but he also insists that "the contribution of genetic
factors to variations in intelligence is something like 80 percent, compared
with that of environment, which amounts to something like 20 percent." Books
and Bookmen, September 1979, p. 48.

[4]On
the World Anti-Communist League, see Michael Billig, Psychology, Racism and
Fascism (Nottingham: The Russell Press Ltd., 1979), pp. 25-26. Concerning
Konrad Lorenz's early connections with Nazi ideas, see Bruce Chatwin's recent
review, The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1979.

Philosopher Who Challenged Postmodern Radicalism Is France's New Education
Minister

When French President Jacques Chirac announced his new cabinet on Tuesday,
reporters scrutinized his choices to estimate their possible effect on the
forthcoming parliamentary races. But one of his appointments is as likely to
influence the world of ideas: The new minister of youth, education, and research
is Luc Ferry, 51, a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Mr. Ferry is best
known for his criticism of several French thinkers who have exercised
considerable influence on scholarship in the United States. The University of
Chicago Press has published a number of Mr. Ferry's books in translation --
including, earlier this month, Man Made God: The Meaning of Life, which
originally appeared in 1996.

A prolific author, Mr. Ferry might be called a "public intellectual" -- if
that expression were not redundant in a country where paperbacks on philosophy
can be found in drugstores. He has debated the legacy of Martin Heidegger,
argued against the philosophical underpinnings of the radical ecology movement,
and written for mass-circulation journals such as Le Point and
L'Express. In the 1980s, he published a four-volume study of modern
political philosophy. He also has some experience of politics in practice --
having served under both Mr. Chirac and Lionel Jospin as president of the
national council overseeing revision of the standard curriculum in higher
education.

Mr. Ferry is sometimes identified as one of the "New Philosophers" -- a group
of young thinkers who, in the late 1970s, challenged the hold of Marxism and
other radical currents on the French intelligentsia. In 1986, in a collaboration
with Alain Renaut, Mr. Ferry published an influential critique of Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan, treating them as
manifestations of what the book's title called "68 thought." (The reference to
the mass protests by students and workers in May 1968 is unfortunately lost in
the volume's English translation as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An
Essay on Antihumanism, published by the University of Massachusetts in
1990.)

At least part of the book's provocative effect came from treating four
iconoclastic -- and presumably subversive -- thinkers as embodying a new
intellectual orthodoxy. For each, according to Mr. Ferry and Mr. Renaut, the
entire Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel was "exhausted of
possibilities ... and must be done away with." Earlier concepts had been more or
less subtle disguises for domination -- even (or perhaps especially) when
philosophers spoke of freedom, universal reason, or human rights. Against this,
radicals conforming to "68" principles treated language or power as forces that
created human beings (rather than vice versa).

While offering a thoroughgoing critique of society, "antihumanist"
theoreticians left it unclear on what grounds one could protest any given
instance of domination. Foucault himself was an activist in the
prisoners'-rights movement and a militant supporter of dissidents in the Eastern
bloc. But given his understanding of all societies as essentially totalitarian,
it was difficult to know how he recognized an injustice when he saw one, or why
he should care.

Against such radical criticism, Mr. Ferry and other thinkers argued that the
Western philosophical tradition, far from being exhausted, remains essential to
the task of developing a notion of human rights adequate for modern society.
(Nor, implicitly, had there been some great leap forward, hurtling mankind into
"postmodernism.") While a certain apocalyptic tone and high-flying literary
quality often accompanied "68 thought," Mr. Ferry's philosophical writings have
tended to be rather more dry.

That has not kept them from being controversial. In May '68 and Its
Afterlives, published this month by the University of Chicago Press, Kristin
Ross, a professor of comparative literature at New York University, treats Mr.
Ferry's work as a triumph of advertising over analysis. His work, she argues,
reflects "the transposition of the marketing concept of 'generation' and other
journalistic techniques into the field of philosophy, such that the new
generation emerges fully formed to render the previous one obsolete." She says
the implicit message is, simply, "Get out so that we can take your place."

Mr. Ferry's "generation" has not sold that briskly in the United States,
where the poststructuralists have created a surprisingly durable brand loyalty
in academe. His book on "68 thought" appeared in France at about the time Allan
Bloom was bemoaning the role of radical ideology in The Closing of the
American Mind. Many scholars assume Mr. Ferry to be a neoconservative, if
they have heard of him at all.

An exception is Charles E. Larmore, a professor of philosophy at Chicago, who
discussed Mr. Ferry's work in his book Modernité et morale (Presses
Universitaires de France, 1993). Mr. Larmore, who has known Mr. Ferry for nearly
20 years, dismisses the neoconservative label as inaccurate. "Politically, I
would say that he is simply a liberal democrat," he says. His rapport with Mr.
Ferry began because the French author "talked about the fundamental problems of
political philosophy in terms akin to those current in the Anglo-American
world."

The earliest notice of Mr. Ferry's work in the United States came in 1989, in
essays for The Village Voice and Dissent by Paul Berman, the
author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of
1968 (W.W. Norton, 1996). "Once you've read Ferry and Renaut's book," says
Mr. Berman, "you really can't turn back to the postmodernists with the same
eager enthusiasm as before. ... He comes with a bullshit-detector. Americans
like to make fun of the French, but when have we had anyone like that in our own
government?"

Commenting on
the new cabinet appointment by e-mail message, Mr. Berman writes, "A philosopher
who did join an American administration would get denounced instantly as a
traitor to intellect. But it's not like that in France. Malraux worked for de
Gaulle, and Regis Debray worked for Mitterrand, and here is Luc Ferry working
for Chirac, and guess what? France is none the worse for the experience. On the
contrary."

With his
movie-star lifestyle, celebrity friends and best-selling books,
writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is the darling of the French chattering
classes. But can 'BHL' be serious?

Gaby WoodSunday June 15, 2003The Observer

When I arrive at Bernard-Henri Lévy's sumptuous apartment
in the centre of Paris, a film crew is just packing up. There could hardly be a
more fitting introduction: Lévy has, as his fellow intellectual Pierre Bourdieu
once put it, an 'immoderate taste' for television studios, and his ubiquity has
become something of a joke. Lévy is a bestselling writer, philosopher, political
campaigner, pundit and luscious-locked superstud in France; but perhaps his
greatest facility is for fame itself.

At any given moment, he
might be seen on the cover of Paris Match magazine, in the windows of numerous
bookshops, and on several chat shows simultaneously. He and his glamorous wife,
the indomitably pouty actress Arielle Dombasle, are the gossip columns'
favourite couple. His clothes (open-necked white shirts and designer suits), his
friends (Yves Saint Laurent, Alain Delon, Salman Rushdie), his homes (the flat
in Saint Germain, a hideaway in the South of France, an eighteenth-century
palace in Marrakech that used to belong to John Paul Getty) are endlessly
commented on. He is rarely referred to by his full name, and is known instead as
a brand: BHL. He is like an unfathomably French combination of Melvyn Bragg, J.K.
Rowling and David Beckham. If Bernard-Henri Lévy didn't exist, you couldn't
possibly invent him.

For a moment, though, it
seems I might have to. Despite the recent departure of the TV crew, Lévy is not
at home. I am greeted instead by Harry, Lévy's Sri Lankan butler (he also has a
chauffeur, a Daimler, and several maids in Morocco). Harry is dressed
immaculately, in a white Nehru-collared jacket and black trousers, and, after
asking me what I'd like to drink, he ushers me into a vast and musty room that
looks like a relic of several empires at once.

The place is crammed with
Orientalist trinkets - hundreds of onyx eggs in an ancient cabinet, two heavily
embroidered Chinese silk lampshades, Moroccan bowls overflowing with exquisitely
wrapped chocolates, three enormous reclining Buddhas, a stuffed cockatoo perched
beneath a boundlessly funereal arrangement of white lilies, another strange item
of taxidermy in a cut-crystal cage, and a divan so overstuffed with pillows as
to suggest that Lévy may be some sort of sultan of the Left Bank.

Lévy has still not arrived,
and Harry is too discreet for extended conversation, so I find myself peeking at
the books. A good few of them have been thrown, with studious abandon, about the
room. Can they tell us anything about the mind of the philosopher? I'm not sure.
I spot something odd about the gargantuan volume of Pascal on the floor. The
pages look wrong, as if they've been painted over. And sure enough, on closer
inspection it turns out not to be a book, but a fake - a trompe l'oeil drawer
carved out where the words used to be.

At that very moment, Lévy
sashays into the room. He is wearing the foundation required by his televisual
activities, and this clearly bothers him enough to affect his manners. As I go
to shake his hand he says: 'I don't usually wear make-up, you know.'

Lévy's reputation for
narcissism is unparalleled in his home country, and he's not unaware of the
fact. The headline of one article about him coined the immortal dictum, 'God is
dead but my hair is perfect'. He has been known to say that the discovery of a
new shade of grey leaves him 'ecstatic', and that people who vote for Jean-Marie
Le Pen cannot buy Philippe Starck furniture or Yohji Yamamoto clothes (as if
their aesthetic taste were their greatest offence). Maybe it's the make-up, but
Lévy seems a little tense. He's keen to get me out of the sultan's salon and
into his far more austere study, where a modern sculpture of a deliberately
empty-headed Lenin provides an unwitting reminder of Lévy's own relationship to
Pascal. He sits down, furrows his brow, makes a few bossy demands about how the
interview is to be conducted, and proceeds noisily to inhale substantial amounts
of phlegm at regular intervals.

Lévy's in the news because
his twenty-ninth book, an investigation into the murder of the Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has been at the top of the bestseller list in
France since it came out just over a month ago. Lévy's discovery, or contention,
is that Pearl's death was a 'state crime' committed in effect by the Pakistani
government, because Pearl knew too much about the links between its secret
service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book led Lévy on a year-long quest
he admits became something of an obsession. 'That part of the world,' Lévy
explains, 'is where I have been, since my adolescence, most irresistibly drawn.
Not the Middle East, despite the fact that I am Jewish, not China and the Far
East, despite the fact that I was once very close to what in the Sixties was
called Maoism, not Africa, though I know it well. So in writing about Pearl I
often had the sense that I was retracing my own steps.'

It's not unusual for Lévy
to insert himself into his writing, but this book takes a new form he terms
'roman-quête', or 'investigative novel', indicating that where the facts run
out, he has gone ahead and made some up. He allows himself some dramatic
musings, for example, on what might have passed through Pearl's mind in the last
moments of his life: 'He thinks of Mariane, that last night, so desirable, so
beautiful - what do women want, deep down? Passion? Eternity?'

Whether or not these
imaginings are to everyone's taste, there is a more unsettling doubt raised by
the fusion of genres. Some of Lévy's critics have long considered even his most
solidly non-fictional books to contain elements of untruth. Twenty years ago he
was taken to task by Pierre Vidal-Nacquet for gross factual errors, the most
patent of which was having Himmler stand trial at Nuremberg, when he had already
committed suicide. Others have simply assumed that Lévy's books are veiled forms
of autobiography anyway.

This view couldn't be
further from Lévy's own since, as he explains, 'I'm not trying to be devious or
coy here, but I am curious about everything - except myself. All of my books are
turned to face others, not inwards towards myself. Half of my contemporaries
have already published autobiographies - Martin Amis has, and he's younger than
me. But I have no desire to do that.'

Lévy is something of a
conundrum. On the one hand, he is such a po-faced laughing stock that the famed
anarchist pie-thrower Noël Godin has hit him a record five times. On the other,
huge numbers of people buy his books. He is not the most serious thinker the
French have, but he is charismatic and accessible and constantly in demand. It
would be churlish only to laugh at him, since to dismiss much of what he's done
would amount to a kind of conservatism. Lévy drew people's attention to Serb
concentration camps in Bosnia, tried to rescue Afghan rebel leader Ahmed Shah
Massoud just before his death, was sent by the French government on a
fact-finding mission last year to see how Afganistan might be reconstructed, and
now runs a newspaper there that promotes 'moderate Islam'. He founded an
anti-racist group to empower Arab and black people in France, and warned of the
dangerous recent rise of Jean Marie Le Pen. He is taken very seriously in very
high places.

Still, it's perhaps not
essential to take him quite as seriously as he takes himself. I ask him what it
means to be a public intellectual when much of what is public about him is his
private life. His wedding to Arielle Dombasle 10 years ago was attended by Alain
Delon, Yves Saint Laurent, François Pinault (the tycoon who owns Gucci and
Christie's) and, by Lévy's own count, 20 or 30 international photographers.

'That,' he says, 'had
nothing to do with my being an intellectual. If Paris Match was interested in my
wedding it was because I married an actress.' But they were interested in you
before your wedding, I suggest. He smiles to himself a little: 'Yes,' he says,
'it's true.'

Lévy claims to have no
explanation for this, and is exasperated by the way in which his designer suits
and unbuttoned white shirts have been fetishised by the press. 'If I wore
green-and-red checked shirts, I'd understand,' he says, 'but white shirts?
There's nothing more banal, more idiotic than a white shirt!'

But, I ask, would he say he
was interested in fashion? He sighs. 'I was interested once, 15 years ago, in
one designer, about whom I wrote one or two pages, and whose name was Yves Saint
Laurent. But what interested me about him was the semiology of his
draughtsmanship.'

Lévy says he just gets on
with his work 'without wondering whether the fact that I am a star might get in
the way'. He insists that he does nothing to encourage his fans. 'People,' he
says, 'don't know that much about my life.'

Bernard-Henri Lévy was born
in Algeria in 1948. His mother was the daughter of a rabbi, and his father had
fought in the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, Lévy père joined
the Free French, and afterwards founded a lumber company that made him a
millionaire. Bernard-Henri has a sister, Véronique, and a brother, Philippe, who
was run over by a car in 1968 and about whom he will not speak except to confirm
that he is still in a coma.

He studied at the École
Normale Supérieure under the tutelage of the great Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser, who was later committed to an insane asylum after murdering his wife.
The news about the murder came to Lévy as a terrible shock, but he still
considers the man his mentor: 'Afterwards,' he says, 'I came to reinterpret the
silences I had taken to be philosophical and the gaze I had thought meditative
as expressions of his mental disarray. It's one of the great mysteries of the
French intellectual scene how this man of unbridled insanity could have taught
us rigour and rationality.'

There is some debate over
what exactly Lévy did in May 1968. Many assume he was leading demos, like other
student radicals. Others have suggested that he watched the entire revolt on
television, thereby learning an important lesson about the power of the media.
He himself wrote 30 years later that he was not on the barricades, but with a
girlfriend who was in hospital (or might this be a veiled reference to his
brother?). When I ask him about the period, he offers the BHL version of
solidarity: 'I was ideologically quite aligned with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
movement of the time, but in my own way,' he says, 'my own very individualistic
and not very team-spirited way.'

At the age of 28 he
published Barbarism with a Human Face, and became the most famous member of a
group called the nouveaux philosophes who turned against Marxism. He was hailed
as the new Camus, mistaken for the new Rimbaud. Lévy became such an overnight
success he was dubbed a 'publicity philosopher', and the group was suspected of
being, in one TV commentator's words, 'an intellectual marketing coup'. An
article in the New York Review of Books reported that metaphysics had been
'resurrected as media hype'.

Soon after that, he met
Arielle Dombasle, who has said that when she first saw him she thought Lévy was
Jesus Christ. He was on his second marriage by then, and had two children. Lévy
and Dombasle embarked on a seven-year secret affair before he made her his third
wife in 1993. Dombasle is regularly voted one of the most beautiful women in the
world by her countrymen, is rumoured to have the smallest waist in Paris, and
has recently found success with an album on which she sings techno versions of
Fauré and Handel. In public, she still addresses Lévy, formally, as 'vous'.

Five years ago, Lévy
directed his wife in his first feature film. She starred opposite Alain Delon,
who played a writer clearly based on Lévy himself. The film was universally
panned, not least for the final scene in which the writer dies in a ballooning
accident, exploding, as it were, in his own hot air. Lévy is still proud of the
film, which he says is 'a lot like me'.

Since he thinks no one
knows anything about his life, would Lévy say that BHL is a character, a
construction?

'Yes,' he admits, 'but a
character constructed partly by myself and partly by others. It's a puppet, and
there are times when it can turn against you.'

'But is there any of you in
it - are you pulling the puppet's strings?'

'Yes, of course. He's not a
stranger to me. But I can hide behind him, and through him I can fight - against
Islamists, fascists, bad guys. BHL is a good soldier. BHL is a good mask... When
one attacks BHL one does not attack Bernard-Henri Lévy. And BHL is a caricature.
He is all of those things.'

'So,' I conclude, after
this barrage of third person proclamations, 'you don't feel personally attacked
when people criticise you?'

'No,' Lévy says, 'Often, I
feel - with good reason - that they are aiming at someone else.'

·
Qui a tué Daniel Pearl? is published by Grasset.

The kitsch queen
of the Left Bank(Filed: 18/02/2003)

Beautiful, earnest and decadent
- singer Arielle Dombasle and her intellectual husband could exist only in
Paris. Philip Delves Broughton meets her

The voice cascading down the worn
corridors of Paris's Opera Comique leads you to believe some operatic battleship
is entering port, all wobbling chins, heaving bosom and tenor-crushing embrace.

Instead, a birdlike blonde bounces
into view on the tips of her mules, with sugar-pink pillow lips and a white silk
robe tied at the waist - the smallest in Paris, according to her admirers. She
has marine 000042 eyes which, for the past few weeks, have been staring out of
every bus stop in the city, and a wide, friendly smile, less dumb and
pornographic than it appears in posters.

Arielle Dombasle leads me back to
her dressing room, festooned with congratulatory notes and heavily scented with
orchids and lapsang souchong tea, the only thing she drinks. A large bowl of
chocolate sits on her overcrowded vanity table.

A couple of weeks ago, all of Paris was packed in here:
Alain Delon, François Pinault, the department store king and owner of
Christie's,
Yves Saint Laurent and his partner and a gaggle of
princesses and politicians, here to see Arielle in a kitschy new production of
Beauty and the Beast, in which she sings in see-through frocks and falls in love
with a hairy dwarf.
Catherine Deneuve, Sophie Marceau and Audrey Tatou may
be better known internationally, but in Paris, no one pulls a crowd like
Dombasle.

An extraordinary book came out last year, consisting of
nothing more than glossy photographs and tributes to her looks, her body, her
brilliance and her charm.
Roman Polanski adores her "passion", Omar Sharif her
"subtlety", Jean-Paul Belmondo her "soul", Christian Lacroix her
"incandescence",
Tom Ford her "spirit" and John Galliano her
"femininity". The photographs show her as nun and whore, bare-breasted Statue of
Liberty and nymphomaniac aristocrat. It is a supermarket of sexual fantasy.

On her mirror is a photograph of
her and her husband, Bernard-Henri Levy, writer, thinker, philosopher, stud. He
is famous enough in France to be known simply by his initials, BHL. She is
holding a cigarette and turning in towards him on a restaurant banquette. He is
looking sheepishly towards the camera from beneath his thick brown hair.

They are wildly rich, weirdly
beautiful, earnest yet decadent in all the right places and could exist nowhere
but Paris. At a time of Franco-American discord, it is hard to imagine a couple
more alien to the cultural conservatives of George Bush's Washington than
Dombasle and BHL. They fit almost every Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the depraved
French elite.

They entertain in Oriental
splendour in a flat off the Boulevard St Germain, staffed by grave-looking Sri
Lankan footmen, and at a sprawling palace in Marrakesh. In the summer, they head
for La Colombe d'Or, one of the chicest hotels on the Riviera, once patronised
by Picasso, where they own a flat.

When they met, Levy was already
married but a prodigious philanderer, with an intellectual reputation as the
biggest thing to hit the Left Bank since Albert Camus's Gauloises. He would see
three different women a night in successive shifts, cruising from knee-trembler
to knee-trembler in his chauffeured Daimler. The money came from his father, a
lumber magnate.

Dombasle was also married, to a
much older society dentist. She had family money and artistic connections
through her grandmother, a grand Bohemian figure who translated Rabindranath
Tagore into French and entertained artists and writers at her home in
Versailles. Her acting career was taking off under the tutelage of the director
Eric Rohmer. But she saw Levy's photograph on a book jacket, "full of pain,
femininity and gravity", and the mojo was irresistible. She wriggled into her
tightest pair of white jeans and introduced herself to him at a book signing.
Soon, they were lovers.

"When I heard of this figure, this
writer, a thinker, a master-thinker, when I heard about his courage, his
boldness," she says, sweeping her arm upwards, "this absolute thinking machine.
And a connoisseur of women, too! Now that, I found very, very attractive. I
think I've always been attracted by danger. I wanted to be the only one to
seduce him. It was a very dangerous challenge. But it worked."

To call someone a "connoisseur of
women", says Dombasle, is a great compliment. It was said of President
Mitterrand and is a way of elevating womanising, adulterous or not, to an art.
Connoisseurs are not interested in mere notches on the bedpost. They crave
women, love and sex in all their variety, mixing scholarly and voluptuary
intensity.

Levy still calls himself a
libertine, which, I suggest, sounds hard on a marriage. "Not when he adores,
adores you," says Dombasle. "Then, he is a libertine but only with me. Voila.
Society in France allows you to be a feminist without abdicating your
femininity. So it also allows you be a connoisseur of women while being devoted
to the greatest causes and a defender of the greatest ideas."

Levy came to attention in 1977 as
the 28-year-old leader of the New Philosophers, a band of young thinkers who
rejected Marx, then still a deity among French intellectuals. He has produced 18
books since then and used his money and connections to support Bosnian Muslims,
Chechen rebels, Afghan dissidents and to take flamboyant, contrary positions. In
the Eighties, he opposed giving aid to Ethiopia, on the grounds that to do so
condoned the ruling dictatorship.

Dombasle grew up in Mexico where
her father, a Burgundian silk manufacturer, chose to settle. She had a charmed
youth, "like Tintin among the Mayans", until the age of 11, when her mother died
from cancer. She was, says Dombasle, a charming, happy, musical woman who
tolerated her husband's wild infidelities. Her daughter was inspired to follow
her example and to be sweet, patient and cultured.

During the Eighties, Dombasle
found work in American mini-series such as Lace and had a recurring role in
Miami Vice. But it was France and the cinema that attracted her. She took almost
any role she could - costume dramas, bikini girl parts. She once played a
deviant Uzbeki mute. But now, at 45, it is by doing a bit of everything that she
has found success. She has made two albums, whose success has confounded the
record industry. The latest, released last year, featured her singing techno
versions of Faure, Gounod and Handel and sold well over 100,000 copies.

"It is difficult to be like this,"
she says. "People like to put actors in boxes. But I have a great sense of
freedom, which pays off. It is a kind of dandyism, a universal aesthetic."

For seven years, she and Levy
conducted a secret affair, meeting in hotel rooms, travelling abroad. "Elevator
men and doormen were our best friends," she says. "Our private life was very
secret, the most secret of secrets. But then, afterwards, when I married the man
I loved, we could do things together, work in theatre, in cinema. So then our
artistic life could relate to our private life."

Dombasle insists that, for the
French, "love still rests on the 14th-century idea of courtly love, the idea
that one earns one's love, one passes tests and through the attempt you find
something wonderful". And all love, extra-curricular or not, is illicit. "Life,
society, does all it can to keep people apart. So when love does arise, it's
fate."

Each night, she says, she goes
home and finds Levy writing. "He writes, he writes all the time. When he's at
the end of his books, he writes all night. I love that. It's so reassuring for
me, because he's there, creating something so important and fundamental."
Recently, BHL has stood up for America's reputation in France, against
overwhelming criticism and taunts that his Jewish roots incline him to support
Israel and America against the Palestinians and Arab countries.

Reading French magazines, you get
the feeling that there is a Parnassus in Paris, chez Levy and Dombasle, where
the best of brains and bodies meet. She laughs at the idea. "We have friends we
love but we're very private. There are always Afghan dissidents, Latin-American
revolutionaries, Chechen resistants at the flat. I am engaged in my heart. I
listen. But I'm not as involved as my husband."

Looking at all the photographs of
Dombasle in her dressing room, I ask if she is a narcissist. "A narcissist is
someone who ultimately needs no one else, because he is obsessed with his own
image and he falls into the water," she says. "He doesn't look at anyone else or
show an interest in anyone else. Looking at myself doesn't interest me one bit.
These photographs I do, they're not me. They're roles I play, little plays in
themselves."

Her philosophy is simpler than her
husband's dark, complicated world view. "One must put love at the command post
of life," she says. "But excuse me, now I must sing." And more of those
improbably rich notes come tumbling out.